Abhiraj Minawala’s debut pushes the franchise back into familiar territory — a kidnapping in Bulandshahar, a child-trafficking network — but as Mukerji marks 30 years in Hindi cinema, the urgency remains intact
Abhiraj Minawala’s Mardaani 3 begins where the franchise is most comfortable: with a crisis that demands urgency. Two girls are kidnapped from a farmhouse in Bulandshahar. One is the daughter of an Indian diplomat. The other belongs to the domestic worker employed by the family. The distinction is not subtle, and neither is the film’s point. What initially appears to be a mistake quickly escalates into a national-level crisis, exposing the familiar fault lines of power and urgency. Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukerji), now with the National Investigation Agency in Delhi, is called in to handle the case. She takes charge instantly.
By this point, Shivani is no longer a character so much as a fixed image. Rani Mukerji’s cop has been refined into a symbol of moral certainty: upright, tireless and perpetually in control. The film is built around this immovability, arranging its conflicts and characters to reaffirm rather than challenge it.
Written by Aayush Gupta, Deepak Kingrani, and Baljeet Singh Marwah and marking Minawala’s directorial debut, Mardaani 3 feels assembled rather than shaped by conviction. The film is predictably structured: Leads are followed, pressure mounts, and the plot expands from a single kidnapping to a sprawling trafficking network. It moves swiftly and keeps distractions to a minimum. But that doesn’t mean that the film has any personality. Minawala’s direction facilitates rather than shapes, keeping the engine running without contributing a vision of its own.
Little sense of discovery
This time around, the antagonist is Amma (Mallika Prasad), a trafficker hardened by her own childhood exploitation. Amma runs a network that targets pre-pubescent girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, drugging and transporting them with ruthless efficiency. As a character, she is brutal, disciplined and chillingly pragmatic. Mardaani 3 positions her as Shivani’s ideological counterpart — another woman who understands how the system works and exploits it without remorse. Yet the writing offers little beyond this symmetry. Amma is formidable, but she is not explored. She exists to test Shivani’s resolve, not to destabilise it. It is a potentially rich opposition that the film reduces to merely a function. Amma exists to raise the stakes, not to complicate the moral universe.
Around Shivani, the supporting cast performs familiar functions. A young female constable (Janki Bodiwala) navigates institutional sexism. A social worker (Prajesh Kashyap) provides access and exposition. A husband (a wasted Jisshu Sengupta) waits patiently at home, emotionally undemanding and endlessly accommodating. No character is allowed to disrupt Shivani’s centrality. This hierarchy is deliberate, but it also flattens the world the film inhabits.
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Mukerji remains a solid performer, and her command over Shivani is undeniable. But it is also a performance that operates on muscle memory. The gestures are recognisable. The tone is fixed. Shivani’s moral clarity is never under threat, and the performance rarely ventures into unfamiliar territory. Shivani does not surprise us, and neither does Mukerji. In that, a major problem with Mardaani 3 is that it believes that competence can make up for the lack of novelty or inventive thinking. Familiarity breeds ease, but it also breeds stagnation. That is to say, there is little sense of discovery left in either the character or the portrayal.
This narrowing is not incidental. It is the result of a franchise that has never truly developed a personality beyond its star. When Mardaani first arrived in 2014, it announced itself as a rare thing in mainstream Hindi cinema: a female-led police procedural that didn’t apologise for its abrasiveness. Directed by the late Pradeep Sarkar, the film worked because it trusted genre mechanics.
At its core was a sharp cat-and-mouse game between Shivani and Tahir Raj Bhasin’s chillingly composed child trafficker. Its effectiveness lay not so much in its messaging as in its mechanics: the pleasure of the chase, the tightening noose, the steady assertion of a woman who understands both the streets and the system better than her male adversary.
30 years of Mukerji in Hindi cinema
Gopi Puthran took over the franchise with Mardaani 2 (2019), steering it into more aggressive and confrontational territory. Sexual violence became the film’s primary provocation, embodied by Vishal Jethwa’s Sunny, a serial rapist and contract killer depicted with almost forensic insistence. As a follow-up, the film proved weaker, struggling to extend the universe Pradeep Sarkar had established. Its central flaw lay in a skewed moral balance: Sunny was granted nearly as much screen time as Shivani, forcing viewers into sustained proximity with brutality. What was framed as a moral confrontation often tipped into excess, with outrage standing in for insight.
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With Mardaani 3 arriving six years later — and marking 30 years of Mukerji in Hindi cinema — the franchise now feels less like a cohesive universe and more like a star-driven continuum. It borrows elements from the previous films without developing an identity of its own. The changing roll call of directors has ensured that the films share little in the way of tonal consistency, visual identity, or narrative complexity. And so, there is no unifying personality here beyond Mukerji wielding a gun. What persists then is not a worldview but a figure: Shivani Roy as an extension of Mukerji’s carefully curated screen persona.
In the last decade, Mukerji has shown little interest in roles that challenge her centrality or complicate her authority. Her characters are almost always tethered to power or virtue — a teacher with Tourette’s syndrome in Hichki (2018), a grieving, righteous mother in Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway (2023), or then, an upright female cop in the Mardaani films. These performances are routinely labelled “hard-hitting” or “powerful,” praise that has less to do with her range as an actor and more to do with siding with the positions that these female characters find themselves in, rather than risk. Essentially, these films ask us to admire rather than interrogate.
In that sense, Mardaani 3 becomes less a continuation than a confirmation, that in mainstream Hindi cinema, women occupying traditionally masculine spaces of authority are still treated as inherently radical, even when the storytelling around them has grown cautious, repetitive and unwilling to evolve. Shivani Roy remains unshakeable. What feels increasingly fragile is the imagination of the franchise that surrounds her.
